The Tiny Caps I Knit for the Nursery
Gene asked what in the world I thought I was going to do with six hundred skeins of the same yarn. I said knit, and he said for how long, and I said until they ran out.
A skein makes about three caps, a little more for the peanuts. I worked through that yarn for fourteen years, an evening at a time. When I started that last box in August, I was down to the final two skeins, and I had been rationing them like sugar in a war.
That is why I knew the green fleck in Rosa’s hand. Nobody in Kansas but me had that yarn. Nobody else bought it, because nobody else was foolish enough to buy six hundred skeins of it.
What I did not know, standing in that hallway with the light coming through the stitches, was why Rosa Vega was holding one of mine in her hands.
“That’s mine,” I said. It came out smaller than I meant. “That’s one of mine. I made that one this summer.”
“I thought it might be,” Rosa said. “I’ve been wondering how to ask you for about two days.”
I should back up and tell you how Josie came to be born when she was, because it frightened all of us, and I do not want to tell it as though it were a small thing. It was not small. It was also not the end of the world, and I want to say that plainly, because that is what we got to learn.
Jenna and Caleb were married six years before they had a baby. They tried a long time. I will not say more about that, because it is Jenna’s to tell, but I will say there was one winter I did not bring up the subject at Sunday dinner once, and it nearly killed me.
Caleb drives a grain truck for the co-op, which is how he met my daughter. Gene introduced them. Gene still takes credit for it, and Jenna still reminds him that she is the one who said yes.
When Jenna told us in the spring that she was expecting, she told us at the kitchen table, with the news already out of her mouth before she sat down. She had a little piece of paper from the doctor. She laid it by my plate like a tip.
I did not cry. I put my fork down, folded my napkin, and went into the bathroom and ran the water for a while.
The summer went well. She got big and tired and cross about the heat, and I made her sit down. Then at twenty-nine weeks, at the end of August, her blood pressure climbed, and the doctor at the clinic in Haven did not like the number. He sent her over to the county hospital for the afternoon. By evening the doctors there did not like it either.